“What should Cultural Studies research be?” In the last two years that I have spent in MACs, my answer to this question has changed multiple times. At first, I wanted to sound like this amazing intellectual who interwove deep and complicated theory into my paper to really make me look like I knew what I was talking about. My last paper was just a bunch of garble that sounded just as lost and overwhelmed as I felt in the program But as I progressed throughout the second year, I started to learn more and more about myself and what my true passion is and what I really wanted to do.

What should it (Cultural Studies) be designed to do? My unshaking answer is tell better stories. Cultural Studies seeks to understand, uncover, and uplift the voices of people that are purposely forgotten and ignored. Cultural Studies research should create a point where people know they can share what they have to say and that it will have an impact. It should be something we care about. It should be something we have a deep unequivocal connection and love for. Dr. Susan Harewood and Dr. Ron Krabill talked about this in one of the very first papers they had us read, they didn’t want us to have “drive-by” projects that we do just to graduate, where we extract what we need from the communities we are working with, never to be heard from again. (Harewood & Krabill 2017, pg. 13) I think it has to be intimate in a way where we can’t resist coming back to it because we want to see where it will go next. Cultural Studies should be designed to continue to make us, the people we care about, and the communities involved better and filled with the love and passion we put into the work we did.

There are a few artifacts that I have in my portfolio that I think are particularly important.

An artifact I want to draw attention to first is my Partner Collaboration where I had an interview with my classmate Courtney, about what we care about and what we planned to do for our projects. Its funny to think that both of our projects shifted to be something different while still staying in the same realm of what we originally wanted to do. We did a sort of analysis of stories that have already been told and who told them, with the answer unsurprisingly being those in positions of power in America aka white, Anglo-Saxon, males who are probably associated with Christianity. The reason we brought this up was because we wanted to talk about who told stories about who and how many people didn’t have the power to tell the stories about themselves because they were deemed unimportant. They are misrepresented and then that misrepresentation is taken and used as a reason for colonization and domination. However, Courtney and I knew that the untold stories had meaning and we wanted to be able to bring them to light. The stories could be about people we don’t know or the communities we have a connection to or even ourselves. For my project in particular I said “I think my main focus is that the experiences of a biracial Black (or Asian, or Latinx or etc) individual is not the same experience as a person who is considered fully Black (having 2 parents of the same race and ethnic background). Being constantly misidentified or having what you perceive as your identity stripped from you arbitrarily is incredibly stressful based on my own experiences (and others that I have listened to). So I want to make the voice louder and noticed to help other people have the ability to be more comfortable in how they identify.” (Clementson & Jones, 2020) This is strongly connected another artifact that I want to talk about which is the Comments on Being Mixed. These comments all came from a Facebook group that I am a part of where thousands of multiracial people have gathered to share parts of their stories. They are all snippets of conversations I have collected from people throughout the last two years that really give the sentiment that I feel hard-pressed to change. I have said it in my MACs bio and all my applications for Graduate school. I want people to feel comfortable with their identities. I intertwine this with my other passion, food. This was something I was always coming back to no matter where I was in my life. I wanted to share it with my friends, I wanted to make it, and most importantly I wanted to eat it. I do truly believe that food holds so much significance to identity, which is why I centered my Capstone project around it. Food tells stories too. In my opinion it probably has some of the best stories to tell. Down to the smallest ingredient, there is history.

There is one artifact that really solidified what I wanted to do with my project and it was the discussion with Robert Farid Karimi. We took the time to read a lot of his work and he said the phrase “I crave the heat of Color” (Shin & Karimi, 2016 pg. 175-176)  and it just blew my mind. It described how I felt growing up so well. One of his later projects actually involves food, where he calls himself the People’s Cook where he brings awareness to health problems (diabetes for this particular project) that People of Color face. (Karimi, 2009) When I learned that I KNEW that I could do a project around food too. I always had a sort of inkling of how I thought knowledge should be shared and the reading The Representation of the Intellectual by E. Said, really drove it home. He says, “There is a danger that the figure or image of the intellectual …might become only another professional or figure in a social trend. …but I also want to insist that the intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be simply reduced to being a faceless professional…” (Said 2012, pg. 11) I also did not want to be that person. I want to better my community, not (act like) be better. I do think knowledge should be shared but only in a way that perpetuates community betterment rather than in the colonizing sort of way that gets added to Academia and then appropriated because it somehow becomes trendy. I wrote about this in (To Be or Not to Be) which was a paper on what I understood an “Intellectual” to be. The knowledge that I gained in the MACs program wasn’t just scholarly references and theories but also the understanding of how we can present and share the work through embodied practices. I love the idea of being able to share an experience with the people that are listening to the story I am trying to tell and uplift. Through our senses we can learn so much. Not only the smell and taste but also the time and effort it takes to make the food. Lila Sharif also speaks of this in her work. I said it in my capstone before but in connection to storytelling and food making becoming an embodied practice, I think it is important to say it again. She says, “The site of the kitchen cannot be suspended to a space―beyond all the discourses, positions, and the polemics, particularly within the context of settler colonialism.” (Sharif pg. 218) Sharif is bringing to light the injustice and hypocrisy that we see in the world (in particular, Palestine) of food making (and consuming). Food in all of its stages, from ingredients to the process of making it, to the finished dish, has something to say.

Some of the most important skills I learned during my time in the program would be the uses of videographic essays to tell stories as well as in a cheesy sort of way, the confidence to tell stories that I initially thought people might not care about. THOSE are the better stories and those stories are the ones that I want to tell. I already had some initial skills like cooking because of my previous work experience and initial interest but ones that I think I still need to develop would definitely be my writing skills to ensure that I am doing the stories I am telling the justice that they deserve. I am eternally appreciative to my Advisors (Naomi and Susan) for their feedback and patience for my VERY BAD writing.

Overall, telling the stories that food has to offer (in relation to or not to identity) is definitely something I will continue to pursue further in my career and I am very grateful for the time I spent in the program. Thank you for telling me that what I care about matters.

Works Cited

Clementson, C., & Jones, K. (2020, May 15). Partner Collaboration: Telling Better Stories. personal.

Harewood, S., & Krabill, R. (2017). Taking Praxis Seriously: Testing the Limits of Praxis and the University. The International Cultural Studies and Education Conference.

Karimi, R. F. The People’s Cook Project. Creative Capital. https://creative-capital.org/projects/the-peoples-cook-project-28-days-of-good-energia/.

Said, E. (2012). Representations of the intellectual. London: Vintage.

Sharif, L. (2014). Savory Politics: Land, Memory, and the Ecological Occupation of Palestine. UC San Diego. ProQuest 

Shin, S. Y., & Karimi, R. F. (2016). Songlines for Future Culturewalkers: (Betty) White (Crocker) Bank Take Little (House on the Prairie) Bank. In A good time for the truth: race in Minnesota (pp. 171–186). essay, Minnesota Historical Society Press.

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